A Story About a Worried Leaf
“It took me so long to see it, but I see it now. And it’s beautiful.”
BEDTIME STORIES
“It took me so long to see it, but I see it now. And it’s beautiful.”
Early autumn. Somewhere in Europe. A Persian ironwood tree in a park.
“I can’t take this anymore, I’m just waiting to die!” came from a leaf with a worryingly yellowish hue.
“Chill man, all this yelling will make you fall,” a bigger greener leaf from above voiced itself.
A feeble-looking leaf shook and said worryingly: “Yeah, didn’t you see what happened to a poor leaf from a chestnut tree over there? It yelled and fell in that very moment.”
“Oh, I wasn’t yelling,” our yellowish leaf was getting visibly stressed with these comments. “I was just expressing my concern for…erm…the quality of our last days. It’s getting very cold, and uncomfortable to bear this struggle, to be honest. And I can’t stop thinking about the way I will die. Will I die as soon as I touch the ground or will I suffer for days, catching my last breath lying on a pile of leaves that used to be my friends? Or worse even, what if a child picks me up and tears me apart into small pieces never to be put together again? Oh, what a miserable existence...”
“Listen to our Hamlet here. We all had a pretty good life on this tree, and now it’s our time to go. It’s the natural order of things,” the bigger leaf thought it was very wise of him to say this.
“I don’t think I like nature, it’s cruel.”
“It is what it is,” the bigger leaf concluded. The yellowish leaf could swear that the veins of the bigger leaf got rearranged into what looked like a smirk.
“We are also nature,” the feeble leaf added.
Suddenly a big whoosh of wind hit the tree and all the leaves held on as much as they could so they wouldn’t be blown away. Our yellowish leaf resisted the force of the wind with all his strength. And just as the whoosh was passing, the leaf felt the relief of being able to hold off his death and he sighed ever so slightly, but it was in this moment that his stem slowly detached from the branch. The leaf looked up to his stem in horror, as he was falling slowly to the ground, morning sunlight touching his yellow surface.
“No, no, no, no!” he exclaimed as he was falling down. “This can’t be happening, I am not ready!”
“You will be fine, we love you,” several leaves on the tree said softly in unison.
But then, instead of touching the softness of other leaves on the ground, the leaf suddenly felt a warm surface touching him. A child held out their hand and caught him mid-flight.
“Oh, no, no, no, this is my worst nightmare. A child!”
“What a cute child”…“yes, very cute indeed,” other leaves were whispering.
“Cute? No, more like dangerous! Children play with leaves and destroy them! Auuah!”
But then something unexpected happened. The child’s face started coming closer and closer to the leaf and he could swear the child was going to eat him. Child’s lips touched the surface of his leaf body. The child kissed him.
“Woah! A kiss, I never got a kiss. What a beautiful ending to his life,” the leaves on the tree were commenting.
But the yellowish leaf’s life wasn’t going to end just yet. The child continued walking carrying the leaf in her hand. She then put it in the pocket of her blue coat. The leaf sighed with relief. “A bit too dark, but I’m far away from children’s faces at least.”
Some time has passed and our leaf thought that this dark place might be where he gets to have his last breath.
“Maybe that wouldn’t be that bad, I am a bit tired after all.”
Not much long after, a hand got into the pocket and the leaf was being taken out. The child put it on the desk and facing up the leaf could only see the white ceiling.
“What the heck is going on? I know where this is leading, I will get split into pieces. Help!
The child took the leaf, put it on a piece of paper, and took out a menacingly sharp pencil. As the child lift the pencil and was moving towards the leaf’s surface, the leaf was desperately calling for help: “Help! Plants on the window sill, I am your cousin, to be massacred this very moment!”
The plants ignored him. They didn’t consider tree leaves their cousins.
The pencil touched the surface and moved, but it was the surface of the paper, and the movement went around the leaf. The leaf could not believe it, he was fine. “Woah, another close encounter with death. But why is this kid doing all this weird stuff with me?”
The child picked the leaf up, making him face the paper this time, and said: “Look, it’s you!”
And there it was, a perfect outline of the leaf’s shape. “I have never noticed my left side was slightly bigger than my right side. Hm, so this is me.”
The child then went on to color in all the details of the leaf’s hues, from yellow to pink, and tiny shades of green around the veins. “She chose such a vibrant pink,” the leaf thought to himself.
The leaf observed the whole process and how the child carefully selected a colored pencil after looking at the leaf each time for a few seconds. It suddenly occurred to the leaf that his colors might actually be considered beautiful.
When the drawing was finished, the child triumphantly placed the leaf next to the drawing and smiled at it. Then she left.
The leaf was now alone, looking at the ceiling again. He was too tired to try to move and see his drawing for the last time. But he didn’t need to, the image was imprinted in his mind: “Look, it’s you!” the child had said. For the first time in his life, the leaf felt seen.
As the tiredness was coming over him, the leaf fell into a bliss of wonder and deep gratitude.
“It took me so long to see it, but I see it now. I see myself, the child, and the world. And it’s beautiful.”
